Over the lifetime of the store, it has generated $25 billion of revenue for developers. The pace that has led to 2014 delivering forty percent of that revenue shows no sign of abating, with New Year's Day 2015 on record as the biggest day of app sales in the store's short history, and half a billion dollars of revenue generated between January 1st and January 8th.

Unsurprisingly, Apple's Eddy Cue was keen to tie in this message of revenue generation with Apple Pay in the United States, although no concrete numbers on uptake or cash-turnover were provided.

Apple Pay (image: Apple.com)

The numbers from the App Store are impressive, and it would be interesting to compare these numbers to the Google Play Store. Research firm App Annie's last quarterly report estimated that Apple's App Store generated sixty percent more revenue than the main Android store.

There are also questions being raised about Apple's draconian policies on developers in terms of usage of SDK's, implementation of DRM on apps, the approval process for updates and bug fixes, and the ability of Apple to remotely disable apps.

We’re only releasing an Android version of the app today. After rigorous review of Apple’s Developer Agreement and DRM policies, we decided we couldn’t stomach them. Read more about our concerns. We think that’s a real pity—iPhone users have just as much a right to the EFF mobile app as anyone else.